“As we consider policy proposals to change the state of ransomware economics, we will need data to assess whether these actions are successful,” Cable said. The already-burgeoning database, which doesn’t include any personal or victim-identifying information, is available as a free download for the cybersecurity community and law enforcement officials, which Cable hopes will help give some much-needed public transparency about the current state of the problem. If an approved report’s authenticity is later called into question, it will be removed from the database. However, in order to make sure all reports are legitimate, each submission is required to take a screenshot of the ransomware payment demand, and every case is reviewed manually by Cable himself before being made publicly available. As the site is crowdsourced, it incorporates data from self-reported incidents of ransomware attacks, which anyone can submit. The website keeps a running tally of ransoms paid out to cybercriminals in bitcoin, made possible thanks to the public record-keeping of transactions on the blockchain. “After seeing that there’s currently no single place for public data on ransomware payments, and given that it’s not hard to track bitcoin transactions, I started hacking it together.” “I was inspired to start Ransomwhere by Katie Nickels’s tweet that no one really knows the full impact of cybercrime, and especially ransomware,” Cable told TechCrunch. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), is looking to solve that problem with the launch of a crowdsourced ransom payments tracking website, Ransomwhere. Jack Cable, a security architect at Krebs Stamos Group who previously worked for the U.S. However, while ransomware attacks continue to make headlines, it’s nearly impossible to understand their full impact, nor is it known whether taking certain decisions - such as paying the cybercriminals’ ransom demands - make a difference. In the last few months alone we’ve witnessed the attack on Colonial Pipeline that forced the company to shut down its systems - and the gasoline supply - to much of the eastern seaboard, the hack on meat supplier JBS that abruptly halted its slaughterhouse operations around the world, and just this month a supply chain attack on IT vendor Kaseya that saw hundreds of downstream victims locked out of their systems. These file-encrypting attacks have continued largely unabated this year, too. At Stanford, Jack is a research assistant with the Stanford Internet Observatory and Stanford Empirical Security Research Group and launched Stanford's bug bounty program, one of the first in higher education.Ransomware attacks, fueled by COVID-19 pandemic turbulence, have become a major money earner for cybercriminals, with the number of attacks rising in 2020. Jack was named one of Time Magazine's 25 most influential teens for 2018. After placing first in the Hack the Air Force challenge, Jack began working at the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service. Jack is a top-ranked bug bounty hacker, having identified over 350 vulnerabilities in companies including Google, Facebook, Uber, Yahoo, and the US Department of Defense. Jack formerly served as an Election Security Technical Advisor at CISA, where he led the development and deployment of Crossfeed, a pilot to scan election assets nationwide. Jack Cable is a security researcher and student at Stanford University, currently working as a security architect at Krebs Stamos Group. Tod highlights some of the many things Discourse is doing right with its security program. Stick around for our Rapid Rundown, where Tod and Jen talk about a remote code execution vulnerability that open-source forum provider Discourse experienced recently, which CISA released a notification about over the weekend. They chat about how Cable came up with the idea, the role of cryptocurrency in tracking these payments, and how better data sharing can help combat the surge in ransomware attacks. In this episode of Security Nation, Jen and Tod chat with Jack Cable, security architect at the Krebs Stamos Group, about Ransomwhere, a crowdsourced ransomware payment tracker.
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